Announcing the winners of the George Smith Medal for IDCORE cohorts who started in 2016 and 2017
The medal is awarded to the best EngD thesis in each cohort (submitted within the funded period). Due to COVID we have only just been able to hold the awards dinner for the students who graduated in 2020 and 2021.
The winners are Mairi Dorward and Diana Jelenova. The judges had an incredibly difficult job choosing the winners and give a special commendation to the thesis by Daniel Milano.
Mairi’s EngD Thesis is titled Enabling Tools for the Development of Marine Renewable Energy: A case study of wave energy converter ocean trials / A novel sensor to measure energetic marine currents. During her research, Mairi was awarded grants from the Energy Technology Partnership Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers Exchanges (ETP PECRE) and EPSRC National Productivity Investment Fund (NPIF) Innovation Placement Funding, supporting her work with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), USA. She received a student award for a paper and associated presentation at 12th IEEE/OES Current, Waves and Turbulence Measurement and Application Conference, 2019. She received the best presentation award under the Marine Energy theme at the 8th Annual ETP Conference in 2019 and an award from the Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers in 2020 for projects that involve innovative scientific development. Mairi was a finalist in the 2020 Scottish Renewables Young Professionals Green Energy Awards. More details on Mairi’s work here.
Diana’s research project was sponsored by Wood and was focused on techno-economic assessment of offshore green hydrogen production from floating wind re-using oil and gas infrastructure. During her research, Diana won the ETP poster prize for the best poster at the Annual Scottish Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Association conference in 2019 and her work was selected to be presented at the House of Commons as part of STEM for Britain in 2020. Additionally, Diana was a guest speaker at different events such as Offshore Wind Europe Conference in 2019, Tech20 webinar organized by Net Zero Centre in 2020 and Women in Sustainability online event in 2020. Diana also completed a UKRI policy internship at Climate Change Committee where she contributed towards The Adaptation Committee’s Independent Assessment of UK Climate Risk report published in 2021.
Mairi is now working for Xodus, while Diana has just commenced employment with her EngD sponsors, Wood.
Everyone at IDCORE wishes Mairi and Diana well for their future careers!
